Saturday, March 31, 2007

The defining characteristic

of the egregious toe-rags who constitute our governing class is their unquestioning belief that they are more capable of running your life than you are.

I do find these people so appalling that it is difficult to remember that this blog is supposed only to have occasional swearing. Fabian privately reminded me that politicians and the MSM will use any excuse to deride and ignore non-conventional sources of information. As far as UK politics is concerned, the blogsphere is clearly not yet mainstream enough and, as I am still wearing training wheels as a "foaming-at-the-mouth" nutter, I will try to keep this reasonably polite. I will probably fail.

In their time in office, New Labour, believing (honestly, even, for some small fraction of them) in that all power for good flows from the bosom of the state, have consistently ratcheted up the state's ability to interfere in your life. From smoking bans to drug czars, CCTV to the National Identity Register, Government access to Crypto Keys in RIPA Part III to "conscription by another name", these cretins want to monitor your life, private and public, and the minute you even think about deviating from their ideas of how you should behave, it's Room 101 for you.

I believe it is necessary for the government to do somethings: defence, policing and justice (not that we haven't seen an inexorable rise in private "security patrols" over the last few years, as all the police are indoors at desks filling out diversity awareness questionnaires) and a basic welfare state. (Okay - the definition of "basic", in this context, is one of these questions that removes political discussion from the list of approved dinner-table conversation topics. My opinion is that we need a less generous system than we have at moment but, far more importantly, we must minimise the combined marginal rates of taxation & benefit claw-back to provide proper incentives for people to earn more at work.) Everything else, they should keep their noses out.

There are few examples, even of bad situations, where political interference cannot be guaranteed to make things worse, at massive cost to the tax-paying public. For an apposite example see here, and this blog for endless examples of simple waste.

We have two choices - live as sheep, dependent on the benevolence of Gordon and his successors, or get rid of them and try to find another bunch who believe in minimal government. Unfortunately, I don't believe she'll be running again.

2 comments:

Paul H.
said...

"I believe it is necessary for the government to do somethings: defence, policing and justice (not that we haven't seen an inexorable rise in private "security patrols" over the last few years, as all the police are indoors at desks filling out diversity awareness questionnaires) and a basic welfare state."

I agree completely. And just look at what has become of those "somethings" you list:

1) Defence. No longer appropriate, so let's quietly drop it: anyway, we Europeans can rely on America to do all that beastly war-stuff (and have the most excellent fun heaping derision upon them for doing so).

Protect Your Bits

Nothing You Wanted to Know

A classical liberal & modern libertarian, economically laissez faire, and a governmental minimalist. Somewhat surprised to find this puts me way to the right of Chingis Khan.
Really, really pissed off at the endemic stupidity of the British governing cliques. Sometimes lets his potty mouth get the better of him.